Chumbak review: Neena Gupta, Deven Bhojani anchor a silly, hard-to-dislike sitcom

Remember the time when a neighbour's business was everyone's business, and nobody needed a true-crime thriller, a murder mystery or a dysfunctional billionaire family to stay entertained? A fight behind one front door was enough to keep the entire building awake. Someone went missing, the colony formed a search party. Someone had an affair, the colony became the investigation team. Someone died, the colony mourned. Netflix's Chumbak looks at this wonderfully intrusive way of living and says: why fix what was never broken?

Created by Aatish Kapadia, Chumbak arrives with the confidence of a show that knows exactly how old-fashioned it is. In an era of streaming series where everyone is either hiding a dark secret, committing a crime or having a nervous breakdown, here are five families in Chembur whose biggest problems are largely each other.

Across eight episodes, the series turns gossip, bickering, eccentricity and unsolicited advice into entertainment. It doesn't always hit the comic bull's eye, and some jokes feel like they have travelled here from another television era. But when it works, Chumbak has the rare ability to make you miss the kind of neighbourhood chaos you once took for granted.

At the centre of this colony are Kuku and Rajni Merchant, played by Deven Bhojani and Neena Gupta. Kuku is living with dementia and keeps forgetting things — sometimes even the name of his wife. For Rajni, who has spent years quietly looking after him, the forgetfulness is no longer merely inconvenient. It has become exhausting. By the end of the first episode, she decides she wants a divorce.

It is a surprisingly heavy premise for a comedy, and the show handles it with more tenderness than expected. Gupta gives Rajni a restrained weariness that says more than an emotional outburst ever could. You can sense the years behind her frustration. Bhojani, meanwhile, finds the delicate line between playing Kuku for laughs and turning his condition into a joke. He makes Kuku funny, but never cruel.

Of course, Rajni's decision doesn't remain private for very long. This is Chumbak Colony, after all.

Mickey and Twinkle Oberoi, played by Arjun Bijlani and Helly Shah, are among the first to get pulled into the drama. If Mickey is curious in the way only a man with too much time and too many questions can be, Twinkle is gloriously naive. Shah is one of the show's biggest pleasures, largely because she understands that comedy can come from taking nonsense completely seriously.

When Kuku goes missing, someone says that the security guard "ghode bech kar so raha tha". Twinkle immediately asks, "Ek minute, security guard ghode bhi bechta hai?" It is a gloriously stupid question. And yet, Shah's deadpan innocence makes it land. Chumbak is full of these moments — jokes that might look ridiculous on paper but become funny because of who says them and, more importantly, how they react.

The other families bring their own peculiarities. Priyanka and Aditya Khanna, played by Manasi Parekh and Sumeet Vyas, have the comfortable friction of a long-married couple. Priyanka can extract an entire news bulletin from a passing comment, while Aditya has the resigned patience of a man who knows there is no point trying to stop her.

Then there are Dharmendra and Kiran Kejriwal, played by Sumeet Raghavan and Sandeepa Dhar. Kiran is an air hostess, while Dharmendra is a comic performer who specialises in playing women characters. The joke is that he rarely seems to leave character. He turns up at his daughter's school, at funerals, at the police station and even during a boys' day out in elaborate women's costumes. His justification is that it makes getting to places easier. The more seriously Raghavan plays the absurdity, the better it gets.

Freddy and Hutoxi Taraporewala, played by Anant V Joshi and Amyra Dastur, are comparatively sane — or at least they appear that way until Delnaaz Irani's Gulshan enters the picture. Hutoxi, in fact, is also the person through whose eyes we experience much of the colony's madness. The series is framed around her book, The Chumbak Chapters, with the colony's stories unfolding during a reading of it.

It is a neat storytelling device, although the show doesn't really depend on it. The real engine of Chumbak is conversation. One person's argument becomes everybody's problem. A pet python's death turns into a colony-wide mourning session. Mickey's affair with a Jacuzzi technician becomes an investigation. When Priyanka and Aditya's son goes missing, nobody thinks twice before joining the search.

This is where the series gets its best material. Chumbak understands that people who live close together develop a strange relationship with boundaries. They will complain about you, judge you, gossip about you and then turn up first when you need help. The show finds comedy in that contradiction.

The humour, admittedly, is uneven. There are jokes that land beautifully and others that feel like they were pulled from an older sitcom and given a fresh coat of paint. Some innuendos are predictable, while certain stretches rely a little too heavily on keeping the punchlines coming. The pacing also loses its grip occasionally.

But Chumbak has something many louder comedies don't: affection. Its characters may be irritating, intrusive and occasionally ridiculous, but the show never seems to dislike them. That warmth becomes particularly important whenever the story returns to Kuku's condition. The emotional moments are handled with reasonable restraint, although the series does occasionally wander into sentimentality.

The cast largely keeps it afloat. Gupta and Bhojani provide the emotional centre, while Parekh and Vyas have an easy chemistry. Raghavan throws himself into Dharmendra's elaborate disguises with admirable commitment. Bijlani and Dhar settle comfortably into the ensemble, while Amyra Dastur and Joshi add another flavour to the colony. Irani gets some of the season's sharper comic moments. But Shah is the one who quietly grows on you. Twinkle's innocence could have become irritating very quickly; instead, Shah makes her strangely irresistible.

Even the background score understands that this isn't a show looking to manufacture grandeur. It stays light and unobtrusive, allowing the actors and their conversations to do most of the work. And that is probably the right choice. Chumbak is at its best when it simply lets these people talk.

No, Chumbak isn't reinventing the neighbourhood comedy. It doesn't need to. Its ambitions are considerably smaller: make you laugh, occasionally tug at your heart and remind you of the strange comfort of having people around who know far more about your life than they should.

You might groan at a few jokes. You might see a punchline coming from the other end of the colony. But somewhere between the gossip, the costumes, the misunderstandings and Kuku forgetting Rajni's name and calling her anything but, you may find yourself caring about these people.

All eight episodes of Chumbak are now streaming on Netflix.